@deepbluelambda: Thank you for bringing this up! I am, like you, a huge fan of Clojure and Free/Libre Open Source Software (and building community).
In the interest of full disclosure I on the Software Freedom Conservancy [0] Evaluation Committee and I am a member of Software in the Public Interest [1] (and a contributor to Debian -- one of the big SPI projects). I would, therefore, need to recuse myself from voting on any Clojure community organization. The key rational you give on the wiki page [2] in asking for support from a fiscal sponsorship organization is (in summary): A. GSoC (or a program like it) and student conference travel B. Infrastructure (like Clojars) C. User group/event support D. Provide beginner materials and training E. A place to donate to Let me comment on each of these... A. GSoC First of all thank you for being being a GSoC mentor! As long as Google continues GSoC (and the Clojure community can provide motivated mentors and students) there is reduced pressure for additional fiscal sponsorship. Often times mentoring organizations will use their $500 portion [3] to help subsidize student travel. I would guess that if we asked conference organizers to support approved GSoC student travel they may be able to help bridge any gaps. I also want to make everyone aware of Outreachy -- a related internship program intended to increase diversity in FLOSS [4]. Outreachy is symbiotic with GSoC during the "summer" sessions: Outreachy applicants that qualify for GSoC are encouraged to do so. Unlike GSoC Outreachy applicants do *not* need to be students and Outreachy offers a "winter" session. Outreachy is now a member of SFC (and thus can take donations). B. Infrastructure (like Clojars) I think everyone will agree with me that we owe a lot of gratitude to @atosborne @technomancy @tcrawley and @xeqixeqi for making Clojars awesome (and an essential part of our Clojure workflow). I notice that some of the costs are (or at least were) covered by sponsors such as Heroku [5]. I am not clear on how additional funding could or would be used for Clojars: I think we'd need hear opinions on that from the Clojars maintainers directly. (That being said I'd definitely donate!) Both @htmfilho and @albinst brainstormed about additional infrastructure ideas (which are cool and I bet there many more)! One tool I use all the time is Grimoire [6] and I wonder if @arrdem has what he needs for this (or could do more with more support)? I'm sort of torn about this... on the one hand I love the idea of supporting cool tools, but on the other hand I'm worried about how funds would be managed/distributed to toolmakers. I think many of the cool tools we already have are works of pure passion. C. User group/event support Typically fiscal sponsorship organizations help projects run their own conferences. I can't even imagine trying to outdo the amazing conferences put on by @puredanger @lynngrogan and Cognitect. What's more I have to recognize conferences like Clojure Conj, Clojure/West and Strangeloop for offering opportunity grants [7] and diversity scholarships [8]. So if we don't run the conferences and the conferences already support diversity and we might have at least a partial solution for students (see above) then there may not be very much additional sponsorship needed??? It's important to point out that our really cool ClojureBridge events [9] benefit already from the fiscal sponsorship of BridgeFoundry [10]. (advertisement: @ClojureBridgeMN [11] is hosting three more workshops this year in the Twin Cities... ask me how you can sponsor ClojureBridge to be even more awesome!) As for user groups my guess is that local groups can attract local sponsors for any other events. I'm not sure there's enough events in this category (not covered by conferences and ClojureBridge) to justify having a fiscal sponsorship organization. D. Provide beginner materials and training Providing fiscal sponsorship for beginner materials is tricky in the same way funding B. Infrastructure is. And I'll point out that there already are some community resources for beginner materials (including ClojureBridge [12]). Don't get me wrong.. I'm all in favor of more and better beginner materials! (Well, maybe is fewer/concise materials are "more", but that's another story...) My guess is that training is tricky for a different reason: training involves more money, more engineer time (vs. supporting infrastructure) and already has competitive commercial offerings. I'll try to find out how SFC handles this sort of thing. E. A place to donate to Any place that accepts donations (esp. in the non-profit sense) must make explicitly clear how the donations will be used. Therefore the to the question "what is the mission" (i.e. the topics above) is a prerequisite for accepting donations. In terms of organization you offer the options i) for-profit ii) 501(c)3 Non-profit iii) 501(c)6 Trade association iv) member in a fiscal sponsorship org like SFC or SPI As you point out I don't think a new "for profit" organization would be a good alignment with community goals. Creating a brand new 501(c)3 is really out of the question -- the administrative burden is immense. A Trade Association *might* make sense, but it would only be possible if Cognitect felt this would be a good idea. It's important to remember that Trade Associations (e.g. the Linux Foundation) are responsible to their members (not the community) and that gives them a substantially different flavor. Joining a fiscal sponsorship organization like SFC or SPI is the most sensible thing for a community project to do. These organizations do, as you suggest, take on much of the burden of administrating donations and expenses so that developers can concentrate on hacking. I don't know (but I'll ask) how SFC handles a prospective project with a code base that uses copyright aggregation as Clojure does. As @richhickey is the Clojure copyright holder I think any fiscal sponsorship application would want to include a statement from Rich on his feelings and desired relationship with the proposed community organization. Even before that I wonder if Rich has any thoughts on all this??? In any case I thank you for thinking of the community and I'm confident we'll figure out how to address the needs you raise (with or without a new fiscal sponsorship organization)! And if you've made it to end of this long rant I want to thank @richhickey (and all the contributors) for Clojure: every time I have to jump back to Common Lisp I thank Rich for making elegant, opinionated decisions that make coding a joy! Regards, --Tom [0] http://sfconservancy.org/members/apply/ [1] http://spi-inc.org/ [2] http://dev.clojure.org/display/community/Clojure+Community+Organisation [3] https://google-melange.appspot.com/gsoc/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2015/help_page [4] https://www.gnome.org/outreachy/ [5] https://github.com/ato/clojars-web/wiki/About [6] http://conj.io/contributing [7] http://clojure-conj.org/grants [8] https://thestrangeloop.com/attendees/diversity-scholarships [9] http://www.clojurebridge.org/ [10] http://bridgefoundry.org/ [11] https://twitter.com/ClojureBridgeMN [12] https://github.com/clojurebridge -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. 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